BYU NewsNet - Students aid in statewide election polls

In the culture of immediate results, 24-hour news and the World Wide Web, voters want to know quickly whether their candidate won on Election Day.

The Utah Colleges Exit Poll, aided by BYU students, provides KBYU viewers accurate predictions as soon as Utah polls close.

The Utah Colleges Exit Poll was created 20 years ago by BYU professor David Magleby, with sampling support from the Department of Statistics.

From its inception in 1982, a statewide poll was conducted at 70 polling places from Cache County in the North to Washington County in the South.

Now, after 20 years, the whole state is polled and has become the only undergraduate student poll in the nation and is known for its thoroughness and accuracy.

"Accuracy of the poll has always been outstanding," said Chair of the Political Science Department, Kelly Patterson.

The exit poll is staffed with interviewers from many colleges throughout the state. Volunteers from BYU, the University of Utah, Utah State University, Weber State University, Southern Utah University, Dixie College, Snow College and Utah Valley Community College are participating in this year's exit poll.

Chair of the Statistics Department, Howard Christensen, said volunteers ask several questions about how the respondent voted, along with questions about attitudes and opinions. Demographic questions about age, party affiliation, gender and marital status allow volunteers to better analyze the poll results.

After the surveys have been conducted, the information is phoned into volunteers in campus computer labs who record the answers and begin to analyze the data.

"It is not an easy process," Christensen said. "If you think about all the volunteers involved, the preliminary work, you can over simplify the complexity of the operation. Over 7,000 interviews are collected by the end of the day, and 3,000 to 4,000 responses are called into the data center."

Patterson said 20 students in political science classes along with about 45 students in two different statistics courses organized the poll and recruited about 500 statistics and political science students to act as interviewers and data entry operators.

"There is no way we can do this large scale project with out the support of student volunteers who do the actual polling on election day and the volunteers at other universities," said Patterson.

Patterson said one of the purposes of the exit poll is to give students real life experience with politics and statistics.

Students are responsible for drafting questionnaires, conducting interviews, assembling materials and handling crises on the scene. The poll requires students to learn about research, polling techniques, and in the process work with statistics.

Christensen said statistic students learn about survey research along with the analysis of survey data.

"In reality, this is a large scale mentoring project," Christensen said.

This year's exit poll is focused on the congressional races and Initiative 1. The congressional races include candidates, Rob Bishop and Dave Thomas in Utah First District, Jim Matheson and John Swallow in the Utah Second District and Chris Cannon and Nancy Jane Woodside running for the Utah Third District seat.

Initiative 1, which will appear on Nov. 5 ballots as the "Radioactive Waste Control Act," would raise taxes on the low-level nuclear waste, direct those tax revenues to schools and anti-poverty programs and ban higher levels of radioactive waste from coming into Utah.